Home › Frozen Desserts › Whipped Cream
Whipped Cream
1 cup double cream 1 cup cream 1 cup powdered sugar 2 teaspoons vanilla Cream should be placed on the ice for several hours before it is whipped. If not sufficiently cold it will form particles of butter. Place the bowl containing the cream in a larger bowl containing cracked ice, and with a cream churn, Dover beater or wire whip, beat until the entire mixture is inflated. If the cream is cold this will take but a few minutes. Flavor and sweeten and keep in a cool place.
If the cream will not whip, try adding the white of an egg. If the cream is to be incorporated in a dessert, omit the sugar and flavoring.
A method rather than a dish, and the assumptions behind it are what need translating: unhomogenized cream of variable fat content, ice rather than a refrigerator, and a hand-cranked beater.
- The two creams"Double cream" here means the thickest cream available, roughly equivalent to modern heavy whipping cream at 36 percent fat or more; the plain "cream" is a lighter table or coffee cream. Two cups of modern heavy cream will whip more reliably than the mixture as written, since anything under about 30 percent fat will not hold air.
- Temperature is the hingeThe instruction to ice the cream for several hours is the whole recipe. Cold fat globules form the network that traps air; warm cream shears into butter grains instead, which is exactly the failure the original warns about. Chill the bowl and the whisk as well.
- Cut the sugarA cup of powdered sugar to two cups of cream is very sweet by current taste and will slacken the finished cream. Two to four tablespoons is the usual modern proportion, and modern confectioners' sugar is a good choice because the cornstarch it contains helps stabilize the foam.
- Dover beaterA hand-cranked rotary egg beater, standard American equipment from the 1870s onward. A balloon whisk or a stand mixer on medium-high does the same work; with a machine, stop the moment the cream holds a peak, as the margin between soft peaks and butter is a matter of seconds.
- "Inflated"For serving on its own, beat to soft-to-medium peaks that just hold their shape. For folding into a frozen dessert, stop sooner, at the stage where the whisk leaves a trail but the cream still slumps, or it will turn grainy when combined.
- The egg white fixAdding raw white to cream that refuses to whip is a genuine period trick, but it leaves uncooked egg in a dish that is never heated. Skip it and use a higher-fat cream, or a spoonful of powdered sugar or cream cheese, if the cream is stubborn.
- Yield and holdingTwo cups of cream give roughly four cups whipped, enough to top eight to ten servings. Sweetened whipped cream will weep within a few hours; hold it in the refrigerator over a fine sieve set in a bowl so the liquid drains away, and rewhisk briefly before serving.
The recipe's insistence on hours of icing is a reminder that it predates the home refrigerator, when a household bought ice by the block and a bowl of cracked ice was the coldest thing in the kitchen. Cream of that era was also unhomogenized and unstandardized, which is why a cookbook had to distinguish "double cream" from "cream" and why so much period advice concerns cream that simply will not whip. Beaten creams are much older than the ice trade, and are often traced to sixteenth-century French and Italian tables under names like neve di latte, milk snow, whipped with a bundle of twigs; the Dover-style rotary beater turned a long arm exercise into a few minutes' cranking.